June 23, 2012 / BY Admin / no comments

With more than 90% of homebuyers starting their home search online, Brokers and real estate professionals need to have a professional website to be competitive and promote brand awareness.

Brand awareness can go a long way for real estate firms by instilling confidence in consumers and being top of mind for when the time is right to buy or sell. However, having a great looking website is only the first step to creating a strong online brand presence.

To improve brand presence and awareness online and in your market, Brokers and team leaders should emphasize on their website’s user experience.

4 steps to improving the user experience:

1. Offer something of value.

• A way to stand out is to have a professional-looking website that offers enough value that people will want to come back to repeatedly. A great way to do this is to offer free and quality content for buyers and sellers in the form of a blog articles or eNewsletter.
• Listings are a great way to keep your website users engaged. You should always place yours listings in a highly visible area on your homepage, allowing them to quickly search and browse home that may interest them – offering a lot of value and saving them time in having to search further.

2. Make everything user-friendly.

• Keep things simple. Your website is your primary marketing tool to converting a client. Customers will browse your site only if the interface is easily navigable.
• Managing a website is mostly trial-and-error. Web statistics like Google Analytics can give you specific details on your site’s strength and weaknesses and allow you to optimize features or webpages based on user behavior or patterns.
• For example: with Google Analytics, you can determine when and where users are leaving or abandoning your website. By understanding this, you can optimize the pages where you are finding your visitors are most frequently leaving your website. By lower abandonment rates, creates more opportunity for you to capture visitor interest and leads.

3. Showcase client reviews.

• Have your satisfied clients sell your services for you. There is no better way to establish trust and credibility than an honest testimonial from a happy client. Ask your most satisfied clients to provide feedback from a previous transaction and showcase a snippet on your website for all to see.

4. Provide Superior Customer Service.

• Great customer service starts with being available whenever your customers need you. Always be available to answer questions and provide assistance to your website visitors with a live chat feature.
• Live Chat allows you to connect with prospective new clients and provide information to them instantly from your website via text-based conversations, creating a positive, friendly, and highly personal website experience. And by servicing your online customers in real-time, you give them little reason so go elsewhere (the competition).

CLICK HERE to learn more about live chat for real estate websites